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system, its costs a great deal to make one work properly after it has desegregated, and I'm afraid Congress and the Administration are looking the other way when we tell them that."

Another center director, noting the Justice Department's general withdrawal from active prosecution of segregated districts, said flatly: "The decisions in these cases now are basically political. We've been told to ease off, to honor the neighborhood school principle. Busing is a no-no. If I were asked to go into a county and draw up a desegregation plan now, I wouldn't know what to do. Our latest instructions from Washington are to call a meeting of representatives from all districts in the state which are under court orders to produce desegregation. Then somebody from the Agnew task force is going to come down to talk with them. It's going to be damned interesting to see what they have to say.” The Agnew group, which includes Mitchell, Finch and five other cabinet-level officials, apparently will assume some of the responsibilities now held by Title IV. In announcing the formation of the task force Feb. 16, President Nixon said its purpose would be to "respond affirmatively to requests for drafting and submitting to the court desegregation plans designed to comply with the law."

If this means the Title IV officials will be relieved of that task, the comments of the university center directors who have been engaged in plan-drafting so intensively for the past year clearly indicate that they will welcome the relief, whether or not they approve of having the job assumed by Vice President Agnew and his task force.

OUTSIDE ASSESSMENTS OF TITLE IV

Interviews were conducted for this report with about a dozen people who have a special interest in the operations of Title IV but no direct involvement in it. These included attorneys for the Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee, officials of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the HEW Office for Civil Rights, representatives of the American Friends Service Committee and the Southern Regional Council, university administrators and state department of education officials both in and out of the South. Among their comments were these:

One attorney filed a formal protest with the director of Title IV, charging that the university center in his state had deliberately concealed from him its involvement in a case in which he was the attorney of record for the plaintiffs. He also charged that the Title IV center had recommended a desegregation plan that ignored the most recent decisions of the courts. "I know that respect for the judicial process is not great in the South today," the lawyer wrote, “but one does not expect an organization funded by the government to aid in the desegregation process, to flaunt the authority of the courts in this manner. I do not know whether the Center's actions in this case result from a sincere belief that the recent decisions are wrong and should be ignored or from the inability of the Center's employees to withstand the persuasions of a school board which they know only represents one segment of the community."

Several attorneys have complained that Title IV personnel refuse to cooperate with attorneys for the plaintiffs, or with the black communities of the districts. "They are usually like part of the school board's team, their counsel," said one. "We've come to expect little cooperation from them." Another attorney added: "It's amazing how there has developed a sort of pattern to Title IV's involvement. At first, they come on strong, with maps and charts and a lot of experts. Then the politicians and the board get a look at the plans, and there's a lot of discussion, and then Title IV people make modifications, and finally there's the alternative plan."

The Title IV offices in the state departments of education, with a handful of exceptions, are generally dismissed as "hand-holding operations," or worse. A state official in Illinois said the Title IV office there "is not offering any kind of positive program to school districts having desegregation problems. South Holland, the first Northern district to be sued by the Justice Department, got a $45,000 direct grant from Title IV last year, with the help and approval of the state department office, but the money was poorly used. Title IV in Illinois is trying to maintain the status quo until it is forced to do otherwise, and then to do as little as possible. There has been constant criticism of the program from many school systems." Such charges frequently have been made against state department programs in some Southern states. On the other hand, a few of these offices are credited with providing the leadership for desegregation in their states.

One federal official who has followed the operations of Title IV closely is critical of the program's technical assistance efforts. "They're running adjuncts to schools of education," he says, "with desegregation issues of secondary or incidental importance. It should be the other way around. They've got their priorities misplaced. They're supposed to be concentrating on desegregation problems, but they're emphasizing team teaching and nongraded instruction instead." Others have suggested that the technical assistance functions of Title IV should be incorporated into other Federal programs, such as some of those under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Education Professions Development Act.

Frequent criticism is made of the direct grants made by Title IV to local school districts, but one superintendent, a former HEW official complained of a grant that wasn't made. He was disturbed because "we were encouraged by officials in both the regional and the national offices to apply, and we got help from the state university center in preparing the application, but then we were told we didn't meet the guidelines. We were as close to the guidelines as you could get, but we didn't get the grant. I guess that's politics for you."

Not all of the criticism of the Title IV program comes from integrationists. Gov. Claude Kirk of Florida, who has threatened to cutoff state funds to school systems complying with federal court orders to achieve racial balance by crosstown busing, now includes the Title IV center at the University of Miami in his scathing condemnations of the Federal Government and the courts. Like the Nixon Administration as a whole, the Title IV division appears to be squeezed tightly between those who insist that federal law and court rulings be obeyed and those who seek further avoidance of such compliance.

Gregory Anrig, who was director of the Title IV program before he asked to be transferred last summer, still maintains contact with the program from his position as executive assistant to Commissioner of Education Allen. Jerry Brader, Anrig's replacement, reportedly was Anrig's first choice for the job, and the two men are frequently in touch. Anrig will not discuss the circumstances which led to his request for a transfer from the EEO, but if he is disturbed about developments in the program since he left, he gives no indication of it in conversation. Anrig discounts criticism of the ad hoc review committee. "I don't think the review procedures have changed anything," he says. "They've been a positive influence on the quality of desegregation plans. I inaugurated the review procedure myself, when the press of large numbers of court orders made previous review procedures inadequate. I don't see much difference in the possibility of political intrusion now, compared to that possibility before. The Title IV director is still in charge, and Title VI is still involved in the review process, and so is Justice. So, too, is the commissioner of education, through the Title IV director. who reports to him. Personally, I think the review committee is working well. The plans being approved are the ones I'd approve if it were my choice to make."

Opinions in the offices of Title VI tend to contradict Anrig's. The views of one high-ranking Title VI staff member appear to be typical:

"The ad hoc committee is making political decisions, not educational or legal ones. Not everything they do is necessary antithetical to desegregation, but they've made enough concessions to political pressure to let every school system in the South know they can be had. And the plans being drawn by Title IV people are more conservative, anyway, than the plans we used to draw. As for our involvement now, all I can say is that until last summer. Title VI routinely reviewed all of the plans drawn up by Title IV. Now we don't. Panetta or his representative have been in on the review committee's deliberations, but they're outnumbered there and now Panetta is gone. Our people in the field have nothing more to do with the plans drawn up by Title IV."

THE INCONSISTENCIES OF POLICY

Brader, the new Title IV director, formerly was in charge of the DEEO program in the Dallas regional office of HEW. Before joining USOE three years ago, he spent 15 years as a school teacher and administrator in east Texas. Since becoming the national director of Title IV, he had had the unenviable task of heading a program in which actual control is divided among several government officials, administering a policy that lacks clarity and consistency. Not only has politics complicated the job, but the courts have not spoken in unison on what is required of school systems which are still segregated, and neither has the Administration.

On the first of March. HEW Secretary Finch said in a television interview that "a very confused set of decisions. . . that go to both ends of the spectrum with regard to the question of busing, for example" have been issued by the federal courts and that the Administration "is confused by what the courts have said." He added, "I feel very strongly that these decisions are moving in the wrong direction." Finch did not say that the Justice Department, by calling for busing in places like Pasadena and opposing it in most Southern Cases, has added to the confusion, and so, too, has Title IV through the variety of desegregation plans its representatives have proposed.

In spite of all the inconsistencies, there is some basis for agreeing that Title IV, through its several forms of technical assistance to desegregating school districts, has at least provided some opportunities for people to work for a better understanding of one another, across race lines. Last fiscal year, more than 40.000 teachers and administrators in 1,465 school districts participated in the various institutes, workshops and training programs sponsored through Title IV, and that-on paper, at least-seems a fair return on the $9.2 million investment.

But the newer and more controversial role of Title IV-that of drawing up desegregation plans, seeking accommodations with the school districts those plans affect, and testifying in court in support of the plans-has caught the Title IV staff at the national, regional, university center and state department of education levels in a political crossfire. By and large, the technical assistance activities of DEEO, when they have functioned as contracts between willing parties, have enjoyed a considerable measure of success. But the more coercive role of drawing plans under court orders, and even some of the technical assistance activities, have often been more political than educational.

"What it comes down to is a matter of will," says Brader. "Where there is not a fundamental willingness to comply with the law, we can't do much.” In recent months, examples of a changing interpretation of the law and a changing attitude about that "fundamental willingness" to comply with it have been evident in many quarters-in Southern school districts, in Northern and Western cities, in state and local governments, in the Nixon Administration, and in the federal courts.

SUMMARY

For almost five years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Division of Equal Educational Opportunities worked in relatively obscurity with school systems seeking help in the transition from segregation to equality. In the spring of 1969, the federal courts began to call on DEEO experts to prepare desegregation plans for school districts under court orders. Since then, the technical assistance aspects of the Title IV program have been overshadowed-and in some cases stymied-by the political atmosphere surrounding the desegregation issue and by the ambivalence of the Nixon Administration in its policies on race and education.

In recent months, the actions of the Justice Department, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the White House, the Congress and the federal courts have been marked by confusion and contradiction on the issue of school desegregation. Whether the confusion is attributed to a retreat by the Nixon Administration from the goal of total desegregation, as some critics charge, or to a combination of circumstances more coincidental than deliberate, the net effect is that no clear federal policy is discernible.

In short, school desegregation has become an explosive national issue once again, and the fallout from it is pervasive. Nowhere is this more evident than in the DEEO. It has become an academic question whether Title IV of the 1964 Civil Right Act can be a resourceful instrument for the firm establishment of equal educational opportunity in the nation's public schools; right now, it is simply an instrument of the Nixon Administration's evolving policy on school desegregation. How effective Title IV may eventually be in giving assistance to desegregating school districts apparently will depend on what the Administration's policy turns out to be. For the present, Title IV is a reflection of the Administration itself, a measure of where the Federal Government is at this stage of the school desegregation issue. One director of a Title IV university center provided this summation:

"School districts which really want help with desegregation issues can find it in some of the centers. But the ones which are still trying to evade the issue, the ones which have no real desire to eliminate racial discrimination, aren't going to be affected by Title IV very much, and some of them are actually using Title IV as a means of evading desegregation, as one more way of stalling for more time. Title IV can't deal with that attitude; it can't move farther than the Administration is willing to move. It is the Administration-nothing more, nothing less-and that means it is confused and uncertain and preoccupied with the political consequences of its every move. Until the Administration gets itself together on this whole question of race, it's useless to expect any more of Title IV than it is doing now.'

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TITLE IV DESEGREGATION CONSULTING CENTERS AT COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES

Location of center

Director of center

Fiscal year 1969 budget

University of South Alabama, Mobile, Ala.

Auburn University, Auburn, Ala.

Ouachita Baptist University, Arkadelphia, Ark.
University of Delaware, Newark, Del.

University of Miami, Coral Gables, Fla..
University of Georgia, Athens, Ga.

Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Ky.
Tulane University, New Orleans, La.

University of Southern Mississippi,2 Hattiesburg, Miss..
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, N. Mex.

St. Augustine's College, Raleigh, N.C.

University of Oklahoma, Norman, Okla..

University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C.

University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tenn..

University of Texas, Austin, Tex.

University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va..

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1 Western Kentucky University center was phased out in February 1970.

$223,962 192,627 247, 305 137,618 375, 325

296, 386

23,912

225, 295

209,633

190,000

247, 239

323,224

239,096

200, 087

349,999

138, 128

* University of Southern Mississippi center is being phased out: a new center was opened at Mississippi State University, in Starkville, in December 1969, under the direction of Homer Coskrey, dean of the university's general extension division.

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